Home Sweet Home
by darthsydious
Summary: Gaila is assigned to the Enterprise. Everyone pops in to help her move in. Fuzzy one-shot.


"Well hi beautiful!" Gaila squealed at the greeting given by her new CMO. Leonard, Nyota and Jim filled her doorway bearing pots and pans and pre-frozen food that Uhura promised to whip up into something scrumptious just for the occasion. Gaila had only just been stationed on the _Enterprise_, a full-fledged member of Starfleet now, a lieutenant besides, working with the master himself, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott. All of her things arrived ahead of her, her living area was full of boxes, some still open.

"I'm gonna make dinner." Nyota said, heading for the kitchenette, "Len is going to help put stuff up on the walls and Jim is going to try to stay out of our pants." Jim grinned, saluting her.

"Scouts honor." Gaila smiled then as he kissed her cheek. "Welcome aboard Lieutenant. Glad to have you with us." He went to the first box, marked 'bathroom'. "Geeze you got a lot of stuff in here, you sure you need all of it?"

"Yes!" both Gaila and Uhura said, he rolled his eyes but headed to the back of the apartment.

A few hours into unpacking, the door chimed again, four voices called: "It's open!" the door slid open to reveal Commander Spock bearing an orchid plant in a flat, very plain and very Vulcan style dish.

"Nyota has told me flora is a usual house-warming gift." He said, and Gaila accepted it, resisting the strong urge to grab him by the ears and kiss his cheeks until he blushed.

"Thank you Commander, it's lovely, and my favourite too. Come in, stay for dinner, Ny's by the stove." she pointed out Uhura's location, and he seemed almost relieved to see her. He went to stand beside her, quietly asking her what she was cooking. Leonard threw a roll of tape to Jim,

"Here make yourself useful and put up the shower-curtain. Jim burst out laughing,

"One time, okay?"

"You attempted to hang a curtain in the sonic-shower?" Spock questioned.

"First year, heck, first day at the Academy." Bones said, nodding toward Jim. "We're unpacking our junk, he comes out of the bathroom chomping on an apple, tells me the shower curtain is put up. I go in there, it's stuck to the wall with a foot and a half of duct-tape."

"Curious, as condensation has a negative affect to the adhesive tape."

"That's why it's funny." Leonard said, rolling his eyes.

"Oh, Len, come here, I want you to help me put up my pictures."

"You got frames or-"

"No. Just all these…pictures." She opened a box, showing him. "I don't want frames."

"But…Gaila, these are just pictures of-" he squinted at a handful she'd given him. "-Stuff, weird stuff. What is this a- a pair of dirty sneakers? And your feet? With chipped nail polish I might add."

"I know." She shrugged, "But all of them are from my last year at the Academy, I didn't want to miss anything. I took a picture a day."

"Every single day?"

"Sometimes twenty times a day." Uhura put in from the kitchen. "You listen to Len, La, he'll know what to do." Leonard picked up a few,

"Here, this one of our Vulcan commander and Ny." He said, "That's a good one."

"I like the group pictures," she added. They started tacking pictures up on the wall, standing back, looking where best to put them.

"This one, of all of us when we were in Paris," Gaila said, "and the one of us playing cards."

"Wait a minute, what about that one-" Uhura left Spock to tend the pots on the stove for a moment, who seemed only too glad to oblige. "the one with Bones and Jim, at the beach remember, and we buried Jim up to his neck, that was a good one."

"Got it." Soon Jim was in the group,

"Use this one, I like this one." Bones said,

"Why? It's just a shot of her and Pike's feet." Said Jim,

"Cause it's a good one." He said. "Trust me." Spock, who saw that everything was ready turned the stove off and put covers on, joining the group. The wall was fairly canvassed in photographs, some blurry, some clear, others extreme close-ups of particular pieces of nature, countless shots of the crew at the Academy. It seemed to him an illogical, colorful chaos. He understood that pictures often made people sentimental, and that Gaila was deeply attached to such things, having grown up on a world geared toward the slavery of women, items of sentiment or personal value had been forbidden to her for almost her entire life.

"It's missing something." She said.

"This one should be near the middle." Uhura said,

"Which-" Jim was skimming pictures,

"This one-" she held up a picture of Uhura and Gaila with Leonard in between, kissing his cheeks, he was grinning, his eyes were bright and shining at the camera, it was taken by Jim the day they all graduated and partied on the quad, and Len didn't have one drink because his daughter was there. The picture of Leonard and his daughter on Graduation day was one of Gaila's favorites. He'd set the little girl on his shoulders, and holding tight to her little legs, he'd gone galloping around the quad as she squealed with laughter. The shot was blurry because he'd been running, but Gaila didn't care.

"Definitly a good one." Gaila said, as Uhura tacked up the pictures.

"I still think it's missing something." Leonard said

"You can move them around too." Nyota added

"Well come on everyone, let's eat, I'm starved." She said, feeling as if she was going to choke on her tears, looking at a year's worth of memories on her walls. They sat on the floor, amid the empty flattened boxes, murmuring over mouthfulls of the spicy jambalaya, the curried chickpeas and saffron vegetables. Spock noted that everyone left a little extra of the vegetables in the pan, and Uhura said it was because they knew he was vegetarian. They sat around afterwards, admiring their handi-work.

"Oh I got it!" Leonard got to his feet, he dug through the photograph box, going to the one empty spot amid all the photographs, he carefully pinned it to the wall, and then stood back so everyone could see. The last was a picture of Gaila in her cadet uniform, her last day at the Academy. Her face was glowing with pride, standing straight and tall, a medal pinned to her uniform for bravery in the line of duty, another indicating her new rank. The one that stood out the most though was her Cadet Insignia. Gaila might have been messy, she might have been guilty of being a nymphomaniac, of talking too loud or sunbathing every morning in the nude on the dorm roof, but there was one thing Gaila never neglected. It was that pin that she put on every single day, reminding her why she left her homeworld, why she was better than the rest of the women who said nothing and let themselves get abused. In the photograph, that pin gleamed in the sunlight, the smile captured by the camera was beaming at that pin, her eyes downcast. Her red curls were pinned back, all but a few that always escaped. Everyone murmured to themselves, agreeing that it was a good picture.

"Now it's home." Gaila said at last. She smiled then, "Everyone get up close now, close- you too Mister Spock." She pushed the Vulcan toward Uhura, who had slipped her arm around Leonard. They all stood close together, though Spock preferred to keep his hands behind his back and not around Uhura's waist as Jim had suggested. Uhura took his arm, and in a moment, he gingerly slid his arm over her shoulders. Uhura smiled up at him as the light from the camera flashed. In a moment, they were captured on film, and a photograph popped out of the camera. Gaila immediately pinned that up under the picture of her in her uniform. "Home sweet home."


End file.
